Forest in a Bottle

'Forest in a Bottle' was rendered in real-time using Blender 2.93 Eevee on a single overclocked 1060. The aim of this animation was to capture a moody, rainy aesthetic in miniature - a terrarium of sorts. Complex material shaders and animation tricks were employed to get Eevee to look as close as possible to a fully path-traced scene - although without the recent developments from the Blender team regarding Eevee's depth-of-field and ambient occlusion - this would not have turned out as nice as it did.

Playing with dynamic paint (waves) for the water - along with a particle system for the raindrop interactions. A combination of Quixel Megascans assets, Ian Hubert Pateron models and procedural modelling for the moss and rocks. The bamboo was procedural and the trees were created using the built-in Sapling Tree Gen addon. All lit from a HDRI, a baked overhead area light and a small point light inside the lantern.

Procedural texturing using displacement for the rocks allowed a randomised, low-poly set of assets that could easily be used in large-scale particle systems. The bamboo mesh was textured painted for extra-detail and realism, and parented to a curve to allow for better art-direction when setting up the scene.